My lab has a new website, designed by my PhD student Rachel Bedder. Other members of my lab include Bastien Blain, Liam Mason, Benjamin Chew, Yunzhe Liu, and Akshay Nair.

Our lab is at University College London and is located on Russell Square in London. Our goal is to understand the factors that determine happiness and to describe how our emotional state influences the decisions we make. We explore these questions using a combination of computational models and brain scanning in healthy and clinical populations. We are working to develop a mechanistic understanding of how major depression develops, is sustained, and can relapse.

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting more than 300 million people. Unfortunately, current antidepressant treatments do not help many of those who suffer from the disorder. It is now widely accepted that depression can result from a variety of different sources, much like a cough can have many different underlying causes. There is currently no reliable way for a psychiatrist to know which treatment is likely to be the most effective for helping a particular depressed individual. If we can identify the causes, we can treat depression more effectively.

Our research lies at the intersection of decision and affective neuroscience and combines computational modeling with neuroimaging, pharmacology, and smartphone-based data collection. By incorporating subjective ratings into a variety of decision tasks, we will examine the neural circuits that determine mood and explain its relation to behaviour in healthy and depressed individuals.

New study published in Nature Communications (open access) by Archy de Berker on the causes of stress. We show that uncertainty plays a major role in determining both subjective and physiological stress responses. Subjects played a computer game in which they turned over rocks and had to guess whether there were snakes under them. If there was a snake, they received a mild electrical shock. Subjects learned where the snakes were, making good guesses even when probabilities changed over time.

We used computational models to estimate the uncertainty that subjects experienced during the task. Pupil dilation and perspiration were both correlated with a subject's uncertainty. In a previous study published in PNAS (also open access), I showed that self-reported happiness reflected the cumulative impact of past rewards and expectations. Here, we used the same computational approach to show that self-reported stress reflected the cumulative impact of past shocks and uncertainty about those shocks. It is worse not knowing whether you will get a shock than knowing you definitely will or won't. We also found that subjects for whom acute stress responses closely tracked uncertainty were better at guessing where the snakes were, suggesting that getting stressed at the right times might be beneficial.

We are halfway through a sold-out ten-show run at the Roundhouse theatre in London (3-14 November). In our art-science theatre project, the cast of 12 young artists and 6 academic scientists explore our understanding of happiness and well-being.

Happiness is a difficult topic to discuss seriously, but we have had great audiences and great reviews (Stage Review, Guardian). There has been a lot of interest in understanding happiness, and I was on the BBC News at Five with cast members Ciaran Constable and Ruby Margetts to talk about the project.

We hope that our art-science project will encourage people to have serious conversations about happiness and well-being. We particularly hope that those conversations will happen across generations, between young people and their parents, and between academics and politicians and everyone else. We could all benefit from taking some time to try to understand our happiness and ourselves a little better.

I am the scientific director ("scienturg") for an exciting art-science theatre project which has a run Wednesday 26 - Sunday 30 August at Summerhall at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Why are young people in the UK unhappy? This question led to the creation of The Happiness Project, a piece of theatre that explores what happiness is in the hope of understanding ourselves a little bit better.

The company consists of 12 young artists and 6 academics. Directors Emma Higham and Tashi Gore introduced the project in a blog post and I wrote a blog post about the project and the science of happiness.

We will also have a run at the Roundhouse in London from Tuesday 3 – Saturday 14 November. The project is supported by a Small Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust.